Just got done evaluating your software against about 9 other products and I can state without hesitation that your product features and design is head and shoulders above the rest. Granted some of the other apps were priced around 20-50 USD and aimed at home users, but I am nonetheless impressed with the completeness of features and ease of use in PaperScan. I believe if your Free version offered a higher page limitation (i.e. 20 pages), multi-page saving, and ad free this application would be recommended on just about every app review blog out there and become the app to use for users scanning documents. This would most definitely increase exposure of your product. I only ran across your application in my research because I was looking at SDKs that provide scanning functionality thinking I would need to write my own as nothing out there had all the necessary features needed in an document scanning app. But google search on "document scan" or "scan software twain" did not provide your application in the results. Granted your application is only a year old. The only google result that came close to your features was Informatik.

I am looking to start an application review blog in 2012 and one of my research articles will be on document scanning software and yours I believe will be at the top of that list. Application review sites like ghacks.net, addictivetips.com, freewaregenius.com, Gizmo's List at tecvhsupportalert.com all drive link backs to the application sites as other link to these articles and thus the google ranking for the software application increases. The the Free program sometimes generates into a paid customer who really finds they love the software and want the extra Pro or Paid features.

With that said, I think there are a few features that could be added to improve this product. Here are my suggestions.

1. Hi-lighting feature
inclusion of a hi-light tool (i.e. light yellow, opaque). Example usage: to be able to identify a single item in a register receipt. Does not need to be annotation, can be part of image.
In addition, simple markup tools like text, arrow, box, line would also be useful.

2. Angle Rotation dialog improvement
This is a very nice an easy way to straighten images when auto-deskew may not work. It would be great to have some angle rotation dialog improvements in terms of size of image represented in the image window on the right of the dialog.
Sometimes the image in the dialog is too small to determine if rotation changes are correctly lined up. Thus it would be nice to be able to have a dropdown that would allow for 3 sizes of the image in the dialog and thus increase the dialogs image area based on this selection. Or perhaps dynamically size it based on the monitor's resolution. Unless of course the reason its a smaller image is for rotation display to be live as user moves slider. Perhaps the graphics API would not be able to render the live rotation fast enough if image in dialog window was larger. Another nice option I have seen apps provide is to allow user to draw guide line across some text in the image and then calculate the skew angle based on this and then rotate it with this skew angle. I still believe the angle rotation dialog you provided is a more user friendly way, but it would be nice to have other options as most times it is not easy to place a small receipt perfectly straight on the scanner flatbed and a straighten image tool is very useful.

3. Color Adjustment Dialog improvements
Sometimes the image in the dialog is too small to determine if changes are correct. Thus it would be nice to be able to have a dropdown that would allow for 3 sizes of the image in the dialog and thus increase the dialogs image area based on this selection. A numeric text field next to each trackbar that would indicate the level of change, that is, move to right would show a positive number and to the left a negative number with zero being the original baseline. Perhaps also have a button that would reset the trackbar to its zero position. A checkbox button called preview, that is, if unchecked it will display image in dialog without the changes applied but if checked it will show changes. Thus the checkbox is live interactive button within the dialog. The on/off preview checkbox is really there to be able to toggle between image with changes and without to see difference. This also could be achieved with the dialog showing the original next to changed one and would be appropriate since many users have widescreen monitors now so space is not an issue. Maybe its an option to display original next to one with applied changes.

4. Customize Toolbar
Ability to add buttons to toolbar for other edit functions like contrast stretch or erase selected or angle rotation. If user uses these often its nice for them to add to toolbar for quick access instead of navigating to menu
Or at very least add these 3 to the toolbar: contrast stretch, erase selected, angle rotation. Also not sure why crop selection is not part of the right click menu since it seems natural to do it this way rather then using selection tool and then having to move mouse up towards a button.

5. Preview Compression
Would be nice to have a preview button in the save wizard steps for the compression option so that user could adjust the compression low enough to where they are satisfied it causes little degradation in the image

6. JPEG2000 support
This would maybe allow for better compression and smaller file sizes while still maintaining good quality.

8. Cut/Join feature
In some instances of a scan, I might have some part of the image that I want to cut out and at same time join the rest of the image together.

9. Home users priced version
I believe $150 is outside the range of most home users looking for a scanning tool. That is not to say that this tool is not worth $150. But perhaps a slimmed down version for Home users priced lower could be made available. Perhaps removing the OCR feature, image processing during batch, and document feeder support but then providing the multi-page save option.

12. Ability to combine narrow receipts on one page
sometime receipts are too long to scan in one scan. So it requires 2 scans and then both parts get their own PDF page, but it makes better use of space, logical layout and readability to put both on a single page. The ability to take two images and be able to combine them side by side centered and with a small margin between them automatically would be a nice feature. Granted the user would first need to crop the 2 image parts before the combine.

If I had to pick the top six requests I would want in order of need, I would say they are:

I see that you created a Home version of your tool, hurray, now I can recommend a document scanning tool to my family and friends.
And after evaluating the Home edition, plan for a purchase. Thanks.

I also see that a 1.36 version was released, were any other of these feature mentioned in this thread implemented in 1.36?

Also I see the comparison chart (which is great) shows that it does not include in batch mode - "Auto-Deskew, Rotation, borders removal, Holes punch removal, negative" but its unclear if these functions can all be done post processing.
So you might want to indicate that in the post processing item underneath. So it might be

I wanted to suggest page numbering if possible for next release. I recently created a PDF of scanned documents to send to insurance company. We started talking on the phone about the document and it was difficult as I could not say "look on page" since their was no numbering in the PDF. Also not sure if you are aware of this but iText (http://itextpdf.com/) is an open source project that has a C# version that will provide some of this functionality.

Also while 7. PDF properties where implemented, they were not done so that these properties could be set for each individual save of a PDF, rather they are global settings that would get applied to every saved PDF which is generally not useful since most scanned docs are unique in the properties other then author (i.e. subject, keywords, title)

In terms of most desired fo those yet implemented I would rank it as such for my own needs:

I am Coralie from the sales department, I hope you are doing well !
Thank you for your interest in PaperScan.
We are always happy to hear from you with quesries and we want to make sure that you are aware of the helpful resources available through our website.
Feel free to ask any question about order processing, PaperScan Functionality, usage problems or any other questions you may have.
A new version of PaperScan has been released with a lot of improvements and new options : https://paperscan.orpalis.com/history/

Stay in Touch

We frequently deliver discount coupons through our social vectors. So stay tuned!

About ORPALIS

ORPALIS produces document imaging software for developers and general public. ORPALIS maintains the comprehensive document imaging toolkit series released under the brand "GdPicture", which is now a worldwide known and respected leader in imaging technologies...more